The Devil's Lair (A Lou Prophet Western #6) (8 page)

Prophet looked away. When he
looked down again, the girl was running her hands down her
father
’s
sallow, bearded cheeks and pleading with him to rise.

“
Dad? Dad, please!” she begged.
“Get up!”

Finally, one of the women in the
crowd—a big, matronly sort with gray-brown hair wound in two neat
coils on either side of her head—moved forward and knelt beside the
sobbing girl. She placed an arm around the girl
’s shoulders, but the girl
jerked away and lifted her swollen, tear-streaked face to Prophet
and the other men standing over the bodies.

Her jaw was tight and her lips
curled back from her teeth. Her voice was brittle with
anger.
“This
is Scanlon’s work, isn’t it?”

No one said anything for several
seconds. Then a short, fair man wearing a white apron and sleeve
garters said guiltily,
“We think so, Miss Fianna. Your pa arrested Rick
yesterday in the Mother Lode. He’s gone from his cell.”

Fianna Whitman stared at the
man, her gaze filled with such reproach that the fair
man
’s own
face blanched, and he glanced away.

As her gaze swept the others,
the crowd recoiled from it as though from a sword.
“And what are you
men going to do about this?”

Another silence hung heavily as the townsmen
shared skeptical, sidelong glances.

Finally, someone cleared his
throat.
“Uh
... we’ll wire the county sheriff, Miss Fianna…”

She trained her squinting glare
on the man, who flinched a little.
“A lot of good that’ll do,” she said.
“It’ll take Dan Ridgely a week to get his old bones out here from
Laramie, and by then Scanlon’s trail will be as cold as Dad and
poor Eddie.” Her voice broke on the last. She dropped her chin and
pressed the front of her wrist to her quivering lips.

Prophet figured she was barely
over twenty, though her manner was that of an older woman, one
who
’d been
saddled with too much responsibility at a young age. Something told
Prophet she had no mother.

Gently, a thin woman in
wash-worn homespuns, who
’d come over from one of the nearby cabins and
shanties, said in a slight British accent, “Come on now, Miss
Fianna. These men can’t ride after Scanlon, face his gun wolves.
Why, they’d be killed! We’d all be widows!”

“
Everyone who crosses Scanlon
ends up dead,” agreed a short, portly man in coveralls and a duck
coat, a wad of chew bulging his fat red cheek as he stared somberly
down at the bodies.

“
Sure would like to see an end to
Scanlon’s hell-raising, Miss Fianna,” another man said. “But, well,
you know—”

Prophet
’s face and ears had been warming for
the past several minutes. “Oh, for chrissakes,” he finally blurted
out, amazed by the townsmen’s lack of spine.

He figured he
didn
’t need
to introduce himself; in a town this size, everyone knew who he was
by now.

He shot a look around the
crowd.
“Your
lawmen have been murdered. Murdered and hung. No citizen with half
a teaspoon of sand would stand around while the killers rode free.”
He stopped and stared at the men, who avoided his passionate gaze.
“I’ll track the men who did this, but I won’t go alone. I’ll need
at least eight of you to even up the odds.”

He paused to study the
crestfallen faces around him.
“Who’s in?”

He looked around the crowd. It took nearly a
minute for one hand to raise. It started a slow, short ripple
through the crowd, at the end of which Prophet counted eight raised
hands.

“
All right,” the bounty hunter
said with a nod. “You meet me out in front of the jailhouse in an
hour, with saddled horses and at least two days worth of
provisions.”

The men who
’d raised their hands slinked
away from the crowd, looking regretful, the others watching as
though the volunteers’ names had been called by the Grim Reaper. A
couple of women clung to them, sobbing.

The girl knelt over her father,
the dead man
’s hand clasped in both of hers. She gazed up at Prophet
through two brown tear puddles, her upper lip quivering.

“
Thank you, Mr.
Prophet.”

“
Thank you, Mr. Prophet,” the
girl had said. The phrase echoed in Prophet’s brain as he rode at
the head of the eight-man column curling into the foothills of the
Laramie Mountains, south of Bitter Creek.

“
Thank you, Mr. Prophet,” he
mimicked now, tipping his hat brim down to keep the sun from his
face, glancing back to make sure the faint-hearted townsfolk were
still on his trail. “Thank you, hell. Thank you for gettin’
yourself killed dusting outlaws you never even heard of, for folks
you don’t owe a damn thing. And hell, there ain’t even any reward
involved!”

“
What’s that, Mr. Prophet?” the
man named Wallace Polk said, riding directly behind the horse
Prophet had borrowed from the owner of the Bitter Creek Federated
Livery Barn and Wagon Rental rent-free, since he was riding on the
town’s business.

“
Uh, I was just sayin’ the trail
must head into the Laramies.”

“
I’m not a tracker, but that’s
how it looks, I reckon.”

“
Scanlon have a ranch out
here?”

“
That’s what people say, but I’ve
never known anyone who knows where it is. Lawmen have tried to
track him before, to no avail.”

“
To no avail, eh?”

This asshole Scanlon seemed to have everyone
in Bitter Creek buffaloed like captive white girls at a Kiowa
powwow.

Poor Whitman. Poor Fianna.

“
I would have to be around when
it happened, though, wouldn’t I? Goddamn my luck!”

“
What’s that again, Mr.
Prophet?”

“
Uh...” The trouble with riding
alone so much was that talking to yourself became such a habit that
you often didn’t even know you were doing it. “I was just sayin’ we
best stop at the spring yonder, give the horses a blow and a
drink.”

They stopped for fifteen
minutes, climbed back into their saddles, and rode until the sun
set behind the western mountains, cloaking the
killers
’
trail. As they rode, Prophet learned from several others that
Scanlon did indeed have a ranch somewhere in the Laramie Mountains.
No one knew exactly where.

The outlaw leader had once
ridden the owlhoot trail in Texas before he and his son, Rick,
drove a small herd into Wyoming and made a halfhearted attempt to
earn an honest living. It didn
’t take the Scanlons long to learn they just
weren’t cut out for the backbreaking labor a profitable stock
business required. Before their second Wyoming winter, they’d
formed their own owlhoot gang of misfits from Texas and Missouri
and started preying on stagecoaches, freight trains, and isolated
banks like that in Bitter Creek.

When they
weren
’t
breaking the law in obvious ways, they made general nuisances of
themselves in Bitter Creek, where Marshal Whitman had been growing
too old and weary to do much about it.
After every big job they pulled, they
hightailed back to their ranch in the godforsaken Laramies, the
compound of which no lawman had ever been able to find.

Dry camping
in a hollow, the posse nibbled
jerky for supper and washed it down with tepid spring
water.

Prophet wanted no fires, in case
the killers were watching their
back trail. To his surprise, the other
members of the posse did not complain. In fact, though they’d
ridden hard all day and most of the men were Main Street
businessmen, unaccustomed to long days in the saddle, there had
been little grumbling at all.

Maybe they
’d only needed a leader to help
them rise to the challenge of running down a gang of cold-blooded
killers.

Each posse member took turns keeping watch
throughout the night. At the first flush of dawn in the eastern
sky, they all rose, ate more jerky with water, tacked up their
horses, and continued riding south. They rode silently, with grim
determination, with a fearful but purposeful air.

At two o
’clock in the afternoon, with a
brassy Wyoming sun beating down on the rocky knolls and sandstone
buttes, they traced a circuitous route through a long valley,
wending through the rabbit brush and wild mahogany. At the head of
the column, Prophet halted his sweat-soaked mount abruptly and
raised his right hand for the others to do likewise.

“
What is it, Mr. Prophet?” asked
the mild-faced Polk, who ran the tiny drugstore he called the
Health Tonic and Drug Emporium beside the jailhouse. “Time for
another break? I sure could use one. My saddle galls are acquiring
saddle galls.”

“
I agree,” said Milt Emory,
riding beside the druggist. He was a lean man with a high forehead,
deep-set eyes, and wearing a threadbare white shirt, suit slacks,
and brogans. Long, sweat-soaked hair hung down from his
floppy-brimmed black hat. Owner of the Bitter Creek Valley
Lum
ber
Company, Emory had put his dull twin sons in charge while he was
away, and the worry of it shone in his dark, heavy-browed eyes. “I
think my—”

“
Shh.” Prophet squinted into the
distance, across the brows of two hills, onto a bench furry with
dusty green scrub. The flash came again, like the reflection off
glass or metal, amidst the scrub at the bench’s peak.

His heart increased its rhythm,
but he kept his voice low and calm as he half-turned in his saddle
to regard the others with gravity.
“Boys, real nice and easy now, we’re
headin’ into that ravine yonder—ahead and right. Real casual ...
like we’re all just headin’ for a shady place to smoke.”

He gigged his buckskin ahead and quartered
the horse right, following a meandering game trail off the rise.
The others followed, murmuring curiously.

“
Mr. Prophet, what is it?” Polk
asked, riding off the tail of the bounty hunter’s
buckskin.

“
I think we’re bein’ set up nice
and sweet for a drygulchin’.” As Prophet told Polk about the
reflection he’d seen on the bench about two hundred yards ahead, he
slipped his Colt from its holster and inserted a fresh shell in the
chamber beneath the hammer, which he usually kept empty for safety
reasons.

He had a feeling it
wouldn
’t be
long before he’d need all six rounds and more.

Wallace Polk looked
around, frowning,
swinging his incredulous, blue-eyed gaze from left to right. “You
mean, you think the Scanlon Gang’s nearby?”

“
I’d love to think it was some
circuit-ridin’ sky pilot readin’ the
Book of Common Prayer
around a coffee fire with a tin
pot makin’ those reflections, but we best assume it’s the Scanlon
boys linin’ us up in their rifle sights. If it really is some
harmless drifter, I’ll be the first to apologize with my hat in my
hands, but for the time bein’, I want you boys to start a coffee
fire of your own, at the bottom of this here ravine.”

“
What’s the point in that?” asked
the portly, pie-headed banker, Ralph Carmody, his face red as his
black Morgan negotiated the grade, throwing the banker forward in
his saddle so that he had to push off the horn to keep from
crushing the family jewels. Turning in his own saddle to look
behind, Prophet noted the gray, curly-headed man, pushing sixty,
had sweated up a good, gray derby.

“
You hunt birds, Mr.
Carmody?”

“
Waterfowl,” the banker said in a
pinched voice with a nod.

“
Well, look at the coffee fire
like a bunch of decoys you lay out on a slew of an autumn morn ...
just at the edge of the cattails.”

“
I see,” Milt Emory said,
sounding none too happy. “We’re gonna sort of call them in ... to
us.”

“
Now we’re talkin’ the same
lingo,” Prophet said as he brought his horse to a halt in the
crease between two hills, at the edge of a shallow, narrow gully
filled with briars.

As he tied the buckskin to a
wild plum bush, he told the others his plan.
“Gather some wood and build a
fire. Not too big, not too small. Throw some green leaves on it, so
it smokes up nice... but not too nice. Too much smoke might make
those killers suspicious. Just a little, so they’ll write us off as
tinhorns who don’t know any better than to send up smoke
signals.”

“
I’d know better than to do
that,” Carmody muttered indignantly, picking cockleburs from the
deerskin leggings he wore over his fawn trousers.

“
When you’ve got the fire going,”
Prophet ordered the group, “climb to just below the brow of that
hill.” He pointed west, to the low, rounded ridge. “Belly down and
take your hats off, and for God’s sake, don’t show your faces over
the ridge top. Keep your rifles out of sight too.”

“
What are you gonna do, Mr.
Prophet?” Polk asked, shucking his shiny Winchester from his saddle
boot. His mild blue eyes glittered excitedly, like sun-shot
marbles.